The Calculus of Dissent Management in Authoritarian States

• In Event: Autocratic Decision-Making

Abstract

In hybrid states with competitive elections, few political opposition candidates reach election day. Many are repressed and others are co-opted during their bid for candidacy. What explains this variation in dissent management? Many scholars in the field of political science have studied the state- and institutional-level factors that affect autocratic decision-making (Gandhi and Przeworski 2007; Svolik 2012; Bunce and Wolchik 2010), however few studies have examined the effect of individual-level variables, derived from a political opposition candidate’s biography, on autocratic decision-making.

Using an original dataset of 4084 federal-level electoral bids across the fifteen post-Soviet states from 1991 through 2018, we theorize that dissent management occurs when there is uncertainty surrounding the potential threat to power possessed by a challenger. We use formal models to test uncertainty about the degree to which an opposition candidate presents a political threat, and how this threat changes with a number of individual-level variables: independent wealth, party affiliation, prominence, and Soviet legacy. We argue that these individual-level variables help to predict when an autocrat will repress or co-opt their political opposition. In analyzing autocratic dissent management, state-level variables can provide some insights, but details of a candidate’s personal and professional trajectories are crucial, and must not be overlooked.

Authors

• Alexis Monique Lerner, The University of Toronto

• Colleen Wood, Columbia University